the true meaning of power

Today we ask that you feel your power.

“Power” is unfortunately a rather loaded word for many people.  It is something to be feared — as in a misuse of power, or powerful authority figures, or destructive power.  Nuclear explosions are powerful, hurricanes are powerful, tsunamis are powerful.

In short, bad things are powerful.  Dictators and earthquakes are powerful.

Goodness is often associated with a lack of power.  There is a meekness, a mildness.  Babies, puppies, kittens — these are considered good, but powerless.  (This is not true, but that is the perception.)

When you think of “aggressors” and “victims,” who has “power”?

The aggressor has “power”, right?

But who is “good”?  

The victim is “good.”

And so “goodness” is linked with “victimhood.”

Victims are certainly morally superior to aggressors, are they not?  They are martyrs.  They are beloved by “God.”  They will go to Heaven.

Victims, of course, tend to be quite powerless, or else they would not be victims.

So, quite simply, many people believe, from a moral perspective:

Power is bad.

Powerlessness is good.  

This is usually not a conscious belief, but if you dig around in your mind, you may find some version of this thought form floating around.  It is very widespread and pervasive.

In many dramas — particularly melodramas — one is shown the character of someone who is downtrodden and abused being very morally pure, or saintly.  Of course this is an intrinsic part of all western religion, meaning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  

But what if it isn’t true?

What if power is neither bad nor good?  

Power is just power.  Electricity is a form of power.  Is electricity good or bad, from a moral perspective?  

Everything contains and radiates power.  Vast amounts of it, in fact.  Power is energy, and the energy bound up within matter is astonishingly huge, as Einstein’s famous equation shows.

Power is energy, that is all.  Trees are powerful, bacteria are powerful, stars are powerful, frogs are powerful, and you are powerful.  Which is to say, you contain and radiate energy.

But if you believe that “powerlessness is good,” what do you think that might do?

Well, for starters, it might mean that you have less energy than you could.

This is not about manifestation.  This is not about magically willing yourself a new house or a new car.  Even those attachments to shiny objects are their own form of powerlessness.  The shiny objects are not good or bad, but thinking you need them in order to prove your worth to the world is its own form of powerlessness.

Just be powerful.  The way a tree is powerful.   The way a blade of grass is powerful.  The way a sparrow is powerful.  The way a star is powerful.

Can you see that fundamentally there is no difference between these things?

The are all energy.  They are all power.  And so are you.

Power is good, because energy is good, because life is good.

Powerlessness as an ideal is life-denying.

If a tree believed that “powerlessness makes me good,” it would slowly die.

And that is what many people actually do, all quite unwittingly.

Power does not mean “have a big ego and push people around.”  That is not power.  That is fear, which is a form of powerlessness.  

Power just means, you are an astonishing energetic being, like a tree, like a star.  

Sit with this.  See what arises.